In Corinne, the descriptions of the Roman ruins become sites overwhelmed and consumed by the sublime power of nature, which spur imaginative thought and fill Corinne with a child’s eye sense of wonder. As the Ancient Romans left a legacy that the world would inherit and become (for Corinne and other poets) sources of inspiration, elevated and sustained thought, and speculation, it is arguable that de Stael partly writes herself into the heroine in that both take on roles as imaginative artists who leave (if I may) ghostly or lingering traces of their existence by materializing or morally directing audiences to exercise the imagination with poetry. Although the Romantics were infamous for palimpsestuously layering their forebears with anachronisms (such as claiming Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, etc. as imaginative artists), at various points in the text, Corinne goes to great lengths to describe the ways the ruins and the poetry that is historically-bound to them become imaginative stimulants: “In this way, at almost every step, poetry and history are brought to mind, and the charming sites that recall them soothe all that is melancholy in the past and seem to keep it eternally young” (187). It should be understood that Corinne does not situate this sense of wonder as reliant on one’s foreknowledge of the poetry and history of Italy to experience heightened sensations, but this idea significantly parallels the material existence of Corinne, or Italy, as well as many other texts written by women, in that many generations inherit texts that become vehicles for imaginative expansion and/or sources of creative import.
What becomes tragic in Corinne is Corinne’s story of how she resists being confined by the limitations of English cultural standards of domesticity and disciplinary coercion imposed by England’s highly regulated spaces/places in utilitarian contexts, especially the domestic sphere, and upon leaving, she idealizes her engagement in creative work, creative inquiry, and free creation only to have her talents infected by her resolution to despair: “Oh, why has Oswald stifled those gifts I received from heaven and ought to use to arouse enthusiasm in hearts in harmony with mine?” (354). As a poet, she feels it is her duty to inspire enthusiasm and direct her audience to awaken imaginative thought processes, but in her own words, this natural inclination becomes distorted and repressed: “Duty, man’s most noble objective, can be distorted, like every other idea, and become an offensive weapon which narrow-minded and mediocre people, who are content to be so, use to impose silence on talent and rid themselves of enthusiasm and genius, indeed of all their enemies” (246). Her initial resistance to prescriptive gender roles, though, becomes a model for women readers, an inherited symbolic vehicle that is taken up and redeployed by many nineteenth-century women writers.
Like the Roman ruins, Corinne’s legacy is inherited by Juliet, but it is a distorted and distanced inheritance that, necessarily, compels speculation and imaginative expansion because information is withheld from her. Corinne’s legacy, as represented in the novel, operates as prolepsis for women writers’ inheritances from de Stael. However inadvertent, de Stael foretells her own legacy by this powerful yet tragic representation of a female artist, which seems to be consumed by the preoccupations of humanity with the material, of contradictory and prescriptive illusions of duty to societal values that stay our natural inclinations and sentiments—best captured in the representation of Lord Nelvil.
What becomes tragic in Corinne is Corinne’s story of how she resists being confined by the limitations of English cultural standards of domesticity and disciplinary coercion imposed by England’s highly regulated spaces/places in utilitarian contexts, especially the domestic sphere, and upon leaving, she idealizes her engagement in creative work, creative inquiry, and free creation only to have her talents infected by her resolution to despair: “Oh, why has Oswald stifled those gifts I received from heaven and ought to use to arouse enthusiasm in hearts in harmony with mine?” (354). As a poet, she feels it is her duty to inspire enthusiasm and direct her audience to awaken imaginative thought processes, but in her own words, this natural inclination becomes distorted and repressed: “Duty, man’s most noble objective, can be distorted, like every other idea, and become an offensive weapon which narrow-minded and mediocre people, who are content to be so, use to impose silence on talent and rid themselves of enthusiasm and genius, indeed of all their enemies” (246). Her initial resistance to prescriptive gender roles, though, becomes a model for women readers, an inherited symbolic vehicle that is taken up and redeployed by many nineteenth-century women writers.
Like the Roman ruins, Corinne’s legacy is inherited by Juliet, but it is a distorted and distanced inheritance that, necessarily, compels speculation and imaginative expansion because information is withheld from her. Corinne’s legacy, as represented in the novel, operates as prolepsis for women writers’ inheritances from de Stael. However inadvertent, de Stael foretells her own legacy by this powerful yet tragic representation of a female artist, which seems to be consumed by the preoccupations of humanity with the material, of contradictory and prescriptive illusions of duty to societal values that stay our natural inclinations and sentiments—best captured in the representation of Lord Nelvil.